A tank exploded.
Again.
Too soon. The 20cm bolt ignited a swathe of forest beside the Yokel vehicle, but the tank's terrified crew was already bailing out. Wager's tribarrel spun their lifeless bodies into the blazing vegetation as his turret continued to traverse.
A huge pall of smoke leaped skyward from somewhere south of Sugar Knob. It mushroomed when the pillar of heated air could no longer support the mass of dirt, scrap metal, and pureed flesh it contained.
The ground-shock of the explosion rolled across Kawana in a ripple of dust.
Something hit Blue Three. Three-quarters of Wager's gunnery screen went black for a moment. He rocked forward on his foot-trip. The main gun fired, shocking the sunlight and filling the turret with another blast of foul gases from the spent case.
The screen brightened again,though the display was noticeably fuzzier.Another of the tanks on Sugar Knob had become a fireball.
The Yokels were running, backing out of the firing positions on the hillcrest that made them targets for Wager's main gun. He didn't know how the combat cars were doing, but there were columns of smoke from behind the knob where his own fire couldn't reach.
The cars'd have their work cut out for them, playing hide 'n seek with the surviving Yokels in thick cover.At point-blank range,the first shot was likely to be the last of the engagement and the tanks' thick frontal armor would be a factor.
A target backed in a gout of black diesel exhaust as Wager's sight picture slid over it. He tripped his main gun anyway, knowing that he'd hit nothing but foliage. His turret continued to traverse, left to right.
the Yokel tank snarled forward again, through the trees the twenty-centimeter bolt had vainly withered. That sonuvabitch hadn't run, he'd just ducked back to shoot safe—
In the fraction of a second it took Hans Wager to realize that this target had to be hit, that he had to reverse the smooth motion of his turret, yellow light flashed three times from the muzzle of the Yokel's cannon.
Hot metal splashed Wager and the interior of the turret. The cupola blew off above him. The tribarrel's ammunition ripped a pencil of cyan upward as it burned in the loading tube.
The gunnery screen was dead, and the central half of the main screen pulsated with random phosphorescence. Motors whined as the turret began tracking counterclockwise across the landscape Wager could no longer see.
"Blue Three, this is Tootsie Six—"
Thousand one, thousand two—
"—we had to bypass the east-flank hostiles. Cross the valley and help us soonest."
Wager trod his foot-trip. The gunnery screen cleared—somewhat—just in time to display the Yokel tank disintegrating with an explosion so violent that it snuffed the burning vegetation around the vehicle.
"Roger, Tootsie Six," Hans Wager responded. "Holman, move us—"
But Holman was already feeding power to her fans. You didn't have to tell her what her job was, not that one . . . .
Four more artillery shells burst in black plumes across the sandy furrows which Blue Three had to cross. The remains of Blue Three's cupola glowed white, and there was no hatch to button down over the man in the turret.
Hans Wager's throat burned from the gases which filled his compartment.
He didn't much care about that, either.
"Willens, bring us—" June Ranson began, breaking off as she saw the Yokel tank.
It was crashing through the woods twenty meters to Warmonger's right, on an opposite and almost parallel course. The 60mm cannon was pointed straight ahead,but the black-clad guerrilla riding on the turret screamed something down the gunner's open hatch as he unlimbered his automatic rifle.
Janacek's tribarrel was on target first. Half the burst exploded bits of intervening vegetation uselessly, but the remaining bolts sawed the Consie's legs off at the knee before hammering the sloped side of the turret.
The outer facing of the armor burned;its ceramic cores palled inward,through the metallic backing. It filled the turret like the contents of a shotgun loaded with broken glass. Smoke puffed from the hatches.
The tank continued to grind its way forward for another thirty seconds while Janacek fired into the hull without effect. The target disintegrated with a shattering roar.
Ranson's multi-function display indicated that both the remaining blowers in her element were within fifty meters of Warmonger, but she couldn't see any sign of them.
She couldn't feel them. They were real only as beads of light; and the red beads of hostile tanks were no longer where Blue Three had plotted them before the Yokels began to retreat . . . .
A tank ground through the screening foliage like a snorting rhinoceros, bow on with its cannon lowered. June Ranson willed a burst through the muzzles of her tribarrel . . . .
Cyan bolts slashed and ripped at glowing steel.
Stolley swung forward. His bolts intersected and merged with the captain's. The cannon's slim barrel lifted without firing and hurled itself away from the crater bubbling in the gun mantle.
"No!" Ranson screamed at her left wing gunner. "Watch your own—"
Another Yokel tank appeared to the left, its gun questing.
"—side!"
Leaves lifted away from the cannon's flashing muzzle. The blasts merged with the high-explosive charges of the shells which burst on Warmonger's side.
The combat car slewed to a halt. The holographic display went dead; Ranson's tribarrel swung dully without its usual power assist.
For the first time in—months?—June Ranson truly saw the world around her.
the Yokel tank was within ten meters. It fired another three-round burst—shot this time. The rounds punched through the fighting compartment in sparkling richness and ignited the ammunition in Janacek's tribarrel.
The gunner bellowed in pain as he staggered back. Ranson grabbed the bigger man and carried him with her over the side of the doomed vehicle. Leaf mould provided a thin cushion over the stony forest soil, but Warmonger's bulk was between them and the next hammering blasts.
"Stolley," Janacek whispered. "Where's Stolley and Willens?"
June Ranson looked over her shoulder. Dunnage slung to Warmonger's sides was ablaze. The thin, dangerous haze of electrical fires spurted out of the fan intakes and the holes shots had ripped in the hull. Where Janacek's tribarrel had been, there was a glowing cavity in the iridium armor.
Willens had jumped from his hatch and collapsed. There was no sign of Stolley.
Ranson rose in a crouch. Her legs felt wobbly. She must have hit them against the coaming as she leaped out of the fighting compartment. She staggered back toward Warmonger.
Shots rang against the armor. A chip of white-hot tungsten ripped through both sides to scorch her thighs.